Great Barrier Reef records largest annual coral loss in 39 years
But due to increasing coral cover since 2017, the coral deaths — caused mainly by bleaching last year associated with climate change — have left the area of living coral across the iconic reef system close to its long-term average, the Australian Institute of Marine Science said in its annual survey on Wednesday.
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Los Angeles Times
12 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Great Barrier Reef records largest annual coral loss in 39 years
MELBOURNE, Australia — The Great Barrier Reef has experienced its greatest annual loss of live coral across most of its expanse in four decades of record-keeping, Australian authorities say. But due to increasing coral cover since 2017, the coral deaths — caused mainly by bleaching last year associated with climate change — have left the area of living coral across the iconic reef system close to its long-term average, the Australian Institute of Marine Science said in its annual survey on Wednesday. The change underscores a new level of volatility on the UNESCO World Heritage Site, the report said. Mike Emslie, who heads the tropical marine research agency's long-term monitoring program, said the live coral cover measured in 2024 was the largest recorded in 39 years of surveys. The losses from such a high base of coral cover had partially cushioned the serious climate impacts on the world's largest reef ecosystem, which covers 133,000 square miles off the northeast Australian coast, he said. 'These are substantial impacts and evidence that the increasing frequency of coral bleaching is really starting to have detrimental effects on the Great Barrier Reef,' Emslie said. 'While there's still a lot of coral cover out there, these are record declines that we have seen in any one year of monitoring,' he added. Emslie's agency divides the Great Barrier Reef, which extends 900 miles along the Queensland state coast, into three similarly-sized regions: northern, central and southern. Living coral cover shrunk by almost a third in the south in a year, a quarter in the north and by 14% in the central region, the report said. Because of record global heat in 2023 and 2024, the world is still going through its biggest — and fourth-ever recorded — mass coral bleaching event on record, with heat stress hurting nearly 84% of the world's coral reef area, including the Great Barrier Reef, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's coral reef watch. So far at least 83 countries have been impacted. This bleaching event started in January 2023 and was declared a global crisis in April 2024. It easily eclipsed the previous biggest global coral bleaching event, from 2014 to 2017, when 68.2% had bleaching from heat stress. Large areas around Australia — but not the Great Barrier Reef — hit the maximum or near maximum of bleaching alert status during this latest event. Australia in March this year started aerial surveys of 281 reefs across the Torres Strait and the entire northern Great Barrier Reef and found widespread coral bleaching. Of the 281 reefs, 78 were more than 30% bleached. Coral has a hard time thriving and at times even surviving in prolonged hot water. They can survive short bursts, but once certain thresholds of weeks and high temperatures are passed, the coral is bleached, which means it turns white because it expels the algae that live in the tissue and give them their colors. Bleached corals are not dead, but they are weaker and more vulnerable to disease. Coral reefs often bounce back from these mass global bleaching events, but often they are not as strong as they were before. Coral reefs are considered a 'unique and threatened system' due to climate change and are especially vulnerable to global warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change proclaimed in 2018. The world has now warmed 1.3 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. That report said 'tropical corals may be even more vulnerable to climate change than indicated in assessments made in 2014.' The report said back-to-back big bleaching events at the Great Barrier Reef in the mid 2010s 'suggest that the research community may have underestimated climate risks for coral reefs.' 'Warm water [tropical] coral reefs are projected to reach a very high risk of impact at 1.2°C, with most available evidence suggesting that coral-dominated ecosystems will be non-existent at this temperature or higher. At this point, coral abundance will be near zero at many locations,' the report said. McGuirk writes for the Associated Press. Associated Press Science Writer Seth Borenstein in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Yahoo
Energy chief suggests Trump administration is altering previously published climate reports
Energy Sec. Chris Wright said Tuesday night the Trump administration is updating the National Climate Assessments that have been previously published, which the administration recently removed from government websites. 'We're reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports,' Wright told CNN's Kaitlan Collins in an interview on 'The Source.' Wright dismissed the past reports, saying 'they weren't fair in broad-based assessments of climate change.' 'When you get into departments and look at stuff that's there and you find stuff that's objectionable, you want to fix it,' he said. Energy spokesperson Andrea Woods said, 'The National Climate Reports are published by NOAA, not DOE. He was not suggesting he personally would be altering past reports.' The interagency process and publication is overseen by the US Global Change Research Program, which was established by Congress. The National Climate Assessments are congressionally mandated research reports authored by hundreds of scientists and experts, intended to inform the country of the latest climate science and the current and future impacts of climate change in the US. The reports take years to research, draft and publish and go through multiple rounds of peer review, with all 13 federal agencies that conduct climate research. An independent National Academy of Sciences panel signs off on the content. The first Trump administration signed off on and released the Fourth US National Climate Assessment in 2018, although it attempted to bury the report's news by releasing it on Black Friday. The current administration has deleted all previous reports from government websites, fired the scientists working on the next iteration of the report, and recently issued a separate report compiled by five researchers that questioned the severity of climate change. Altering or revising previously published assessments would be a significant escalation in the administration's attempts to wipe credible climate science off the record. 'That would be a very unusual approach, especially given the process that went into creating these,' said scientist Zeke Hausfather, the climate research lead at financial services company Stripe, who helped author the Fifth National Climate Assessment. Wright played a large role in commissioning a new federal report that questioned the severity of climate change, authored by five researchers who are well-known climate contrarians. The report was issued last week, in conjunction with a proposed regulatory repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency's 'endangerment finding,' a 2009 scientific finding that human-caused climate change endangers human health and safety. Wright told CNN that he hand-picked the four researchers and one economist who authored the Trump administration report: John Christy and Roy Spencer, both research scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, Steven E. Koonin of Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Georgia Tech professor emeritus Judith Curry and Canadian economist Ross McKitrick. 'I just made a list of who do I think are the true, honest scientists,' Wright said. 'I made a list of about a dozen of them that I thought were very senior and very well respected. I called the top five, and everyone said yes.' Compared to the National Climate Assessments and international climate science reports that take years to compile and review, the recent DOE report took just two months to produce. It is now undergoing a public comment process.
New York Times
14 hours ago
- New York Times
A Famously Stable Glacier in Argentina Suddenly Looks Anything But
For decades, the Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina has looked like an outlier as so many of the world's other great ice masses melt and waste away. The glacier's snout — its mighty leading edge — lengthened and shortened, but not by much, at least by glacial standards. Its surface didn't thin greatly. In fact, it may have even gotten a little thicker. All that seems to be changing. The Perito Moreno has been thinning at a sharply accelerated rate since 2019, scientists reported on Thursday. And if the thinning doesn't slow, it could kick-start a series of changes that might cause the ice to shrink even faster. 'Everything that we can see and know lets us believe that irreversible and large-scale glacier retreat is imminent,' said Moritz Koch, a doctoral student in geography and geosciences at Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. If Mr. Koch and his colleagues' predictions, published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, are borne out, they imply a momentous change of fortune for one of the world's most beloved glaciers. The Perito Moreno is the centerpiece of Los Glaciares National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site visited by hundreds of thousands of people every year. The glacier, a river of craggy ice nearly 20 miles long, pours out of the cloud-swathed southern Andes like a mirage. Tourists gather at its side to watch huge chunks of bluish ice peel off and plunge, with a thunderous splash, into the lake at the glacier's edge. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
